The Strangest Coincidence

The Moon can make Nuclear Power Safe

The psychologist Carl Jung attached great importance to coincidences. He saw them as a kind of cosmic glue which bound random events together into a meaningful pattern. Consider two events of the last few months which do not appear, at first sight, to have any connection with each other, but which may be closely intertwined: 1. President Bush urges the construction of manned bases on the Moon. 2. Professor David King, the British government's chief science adviser, reports great progress in thermonuclear fusion, machinery that will mimic the reactions in the core of the Sun and give us limitless energy. The experimental fusion reactor at Culham, Oxfordshire, already produces as much energy as it consumes, and King envisages a future machine that will produce 10 times more energy than it consumes.

Carol Jung - psychologist

In a curious fashion that would have delighted Jung, these two long-term projects are bound together. Each depends for its success on the success of the other. For nuclear fusion, burning hydrogen until it releases energy, will not be absolutely safe. It will produce bursts of neutrons and make the protective walls of the machine radioactive. The answer to this problem is not to use hydrogen, but rather helium-3, an isotope of the second lightest element in the universe. Burning helium-3 cannot produce neutrons and it will make fusion power truly safe. Unfortunately––or perhaps fortunately for space enthusiasts––helium-3 is extremely rare on Earth, and collecting it on this planet for use in fusion reactors would be prohibitively expensive. But helium-3 exists in abundance on the Moon. Found in rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts, it is contained in the solar wind that has battered the airless lunar surface for billions of years, while unable to penetrate our atmosphere. A single spaceship's load of 25 tons of this substance could provide all of Europe's needs for a year, and a million tons of it could power the entire planet for thousands of years, even with a population exceeding 10 billion people. It could also power the engines of fast interplanetary spaceships, making it unnecessary to build such spacecraft on Earth, a project that has always aroused nervousness of people fearing an explosion during launch. ``The Moon could be the Persian Gulf of the 21st century, with helium-3 as its cash crop,''' says Gerald Kulcinski, professor of nuclear engineering and director of the Fusion Technology Institute at Wisconsin University. ``On Earth, you could safely build a helium-3 reactor in the middle of a big city.'' The concurrence of these two events is extraordinary. For nearly 20 years the Culham reactor consumed more energy than it produced, and critics began to call the project a waste of money. And for more than that time, since the end of Apollo, the Moon attracted no attention at all. Then, suddenly, both situations changed. But the ``coincidence'' may itself be nothing but a coincidence! All the evidence I know of suggests that the universe is ruled only by cause and effect. In 1913, Jung proposed his theory of coincidences to his mentor Sigmund Freud. The latter disagreed furiously, and the two men never spoke to each other again.